Discover New Ways To Enjoy Chess (And Win Prizes)
March is here! Read on for event coverage and recaps, product improvements designed to make your life easier, and lots of exciting community updates and ways for you to win prizes, learn from titled players, and connect with other chess lovers.
Here's what this monthly update covers:
Product & Engineering
The team's focus has been on optimizing and improving various aspects of your experience on Chess.com, as well as quelling a small robot uprising.
- The cat bots were replaced by A.I. bots, from the still-learning ChessGPT to the mighty Agent Chess. While they might not have been as cute and fluffy as their predecessors, the community played a whopping 137 million games against them.
- Many of those games were played against Luk.AI, the basketball superstar bot, who improved over the course of the month before defeating Agent Chess and cementing his place under the 'Personalities' section of Play Computer.
- We have made improvements to our friends and social features to make finding, inviting, and challenging your friends easier than ever. The search function now searches all members, the page looks nicer and more intuitive, and it should now be easier than ever to play with your friends.
- In January, we added 15,154 additional puzzles, bringing our total up to 594,630.
- In February, our total is at 594,570. Why the drop in numbers? We delisted lots of sub-optimal puzzles. If you've ever reported a puzzle for not being great, thank you! There's a chance that it was one of the ones we removed.
If you are an engineer and want to help grow the game of chess, come work with us! Visit Chess.com/jobs to find out more.
Events
The first event of the 2023 Champions Chess Tour was decided in a showdown between GMs Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura, with plenty more action playing out this month.
- GM Magnus Carlsen won the Champions Chess Tour Airthings Masters 2023 Division I after defeating Nakamura in the Grand Final. GM Fabiano Caruana took Division II, while GM Sam Sevian won Division III.
- The 2023 Pro Chess League is in full swing, with plenty of competitive action taking place every day. The Indian Yogis were the first team to qualify for the playoffs, with an average age of only 18 years old! You can watch the 2023 PCL on Chess.com/TV, our Twitch channel, and YouTube.com/ChesscomLive.
- GM Hikaru Nakamura was the convincing winner of the second edition of Chess.com's newest titled arena, Bullet Brawl. He scored 65 wins, four draws, and 12 losses en route to claiming the $1,000 prize.
- In other news, GM Hikaru Nakamura also won his 50th Titled Tuesday event. To put this into context, in the nearly 180 Titled Tuesdays since the event moved to 11 rounds on October 20, 2020, Nakamura has won nearly 30% of these events despite hundreds of top-level participants gunning for first place in every tournament.
Community
Here are some of the Community Team’s highlights, including a weekly chance for you to win a Chess.com Diamond membership and more.
- The PCL Prediction Contest continues! Prizes will be awarded on a weekly basis as well as an overall prize at the end of the competition, so there’s always something to play for, no matter what your previous results were. Check out all the info here.
- Looking for some extra insights to help you make your predictions? Check out the weekly PCL Talkshow every Monday on Twitch at 3 p.m. EST, featuring IM Kassa Korley and chessboxing champion Matt Thomas.
- There are more reasons than ever before to join the Chess.com Discord:
- Blitz Arenas every Friday with Diamond membership prizes for the top three + a random user who played more than eight games!
- Thursdays feature 'Community Hour' sessions with Chess.com staff, alternated with AMAs in which the community can engage with titled players like GM Sam Shankland and IM Andras Toth.
- Weekly 'Find the Plan' events, where the community can analyze a position together and try to find the best course of action.
- The chance to win exclusive merch prizes for the most active participants of 'Danny vs Discord', a game our community is playing against IM Danny Rensch through discussing moves and voting.
- Plenty of exciting things coming up in the future: a 'caption this' meme contest, more event-related prediction contests, more arenas, and educational content aimed at improving chess players.
Content
Here's a rundown of some of the top chess content from February.
- Lularobs returned with a fun (and tongue-in-cheek) article about how to deal with a parent's greatest fear: their once-innocent child becoming obsessed with online chess.
- February marked Black History Month in the US, and IM Kassa Korley interviewed a series of prominent African-American players to find out more about their career paths in a game in which they still find themselves under-represented. Kassa spoke to NM Jerald Times, FM Brewington Hardaway, FM Joshua Colas, and GM Maurice Ashley.
- The end of February also marked an unfortunate milestone: the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the war that followed. Peter Doggers spoke to the Ukrainian chess community about how the terrible developments in their country continue to affect their lives and families.
Fair Play
The Fair Play team has been hard at work. In addition to their regular checks and keeping things fair for all Chess.com users, the Champions Chess Tour and Pro Chess League are off to a good start!
Fair Play stats for February:
- 121,938 Fair Play closures (including 7 titled players)
- 305,547 mute actions
- 267,406 accounts muted
- 144,411 abuse closures
Support
The Chess.com Support Team is experiencing a huge amount of requests and questions. Because we want to fix your problems and help everyone as best as possible, it means that solving issues can take time. Since the team is receiving more than double the usual workload, it could take several days to get back to you. Know that everyone is working hard behind the scenes and that we take your issues seriously! Here are the stats for February:
- Average Time to First Response: Longer than usual
- Total Support Responses: 63,133
- Average Quality by Member Rating: 93%
- Total Ratings: 5,444
As always, thank you for making Chess.com such an amazing place, and thank you for the comments you leave on these updates. Stay tuned—your thoughts might be featured in one of these updates soon...
